I've just installed photoshop CS4 onto my laptop and when I try to run the program, it'll go through the process of loading. But at the last step a pop up comes up and says "could not open a scratch file because the file could not be found." After clicking ok, another box pops up and says "could not intialize photoshop because the file could not be found." Can anyone tell me how to resolve this problem?

I'm not sure how to set a drive to be a scratch file. How do I set a scratch drive? Would Photoshop have fully open for me to set its preferences? The only other drive I have on my computer is a recovery drive.

When you get this error message, before you close it, is there a file called Photoshop TempNNNNNNNNNN on C:\ or D:\ or E:\ or whatever internal drives you have? And once you close Photoshop does this file still exist? On my Win7 system the Photoshop Temp file is created on the root of my E: drive when I start up Photoshop and disappears when I exit. If this file lingers after Photoshop has ended then there could be a permissions problem or corruption problem on that drive.

You might want to run chkdsk c: and chkdsk d: (whatever your internal drive letters are) from a command-prompt to see if there are any errors on any of them, and if so, then fix them with chkdsk x: /f or run a scandisk with the fix-filesystem-errors option enabled.

I suppose it's possible your drive letters have changed and the drive you used to have the Photoshop scratch file on is now a CD drive and cannot be opened by Photoshop, anymore. If you've added a CD drive or another internal drive then you may want to switch around drive letters temporarily until the ones Photoshop used to write to are writable, again, and if Photoshop opens successfully, set the scratch file to C:\ and then change the drives back to how you want them, then set the Photoshop's scratch to the drive you want after the drive letters are what you want.

Another thought: Long ago there used to be a limit to how many files were allowed in a root directory. I don't know if this limit still exists with more modern OSes, but if you have a lot of files in a root directory then get rid of a few and see if things start to work.

Hi, i was having exactly the same problem after i reformatted my laptop. Did anyone found out what's the root cause and the solution of it? I know it is quite a rare problem cause I hardly can search the post that post exactly the same issue as mine other than this post. I really hope someone can help me on this, cause I depend a lot on PS, without it my laptop will be literally "handicapped".

When you're starting Photoshop, IMMEDIATELY after clicking on the menu item or icon, hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys. You will be prompted to change the scratch disk assignments, and I'm betting that will lead you to being able to start Photoshop.

Also, make sure your TEMP and TMP environment variables are pointing at an actual folder that you can access in a read/write manner.

Thanks Noel. I've tried method that but when I changed it to another location, then another problems pop up: immediately PS gets crashed and the fault module is "msvcr90.dl". Once I thought that it's my hard disk causing the problem but when I reformatted my laptop using another HDD & try install the PS again... same thing happened.

"Also, make sure your TEMP and TMP environment variables are pointing at an actual folder that you can access in a read/write manner."

- How do I know that it is pointing at the folder that I can access in a read/write manner?

Open a CMD window, and type the command SET T followed by Enter. This will show you what the values of your TEMP and TMP environment variables are - specifically what folder(s) they point to (it may also show other variables that start with T, and you can ignore them).

Now try to save a file in the folder(s) identified. If you are successful, you have write access to your temporary areas.

For what it's worth, I always reconfigure my TEMP and TMP variables on all my Windows systems to point to a directory I've specifically created for the purpose: C:\TEMP

OK. So the TEMP and TMP environment variables on my laptop are pointing at an actual folder that I can access in a read/write manner, but I still couldn't get PS works. Any other possible solution? It would be good if Adobe can list out all the possible problems & solutions when something happen without having me to guess around what's the root cause there.

Finally, I got the PS to work. The root cause is the hard disk. The reason why I still couldn't run PS last time even though I reformatted my laptop for a lot of times is because my hard disk was sort of having some errors. It might be a minor one but PS just won't run. So this time I reformatted my hard disk to be only in 1 partition (means only C drive cause last time I have 2 partitions) and it works perfectly. So the problem here is with my HDD & I need to wholly reformat it before I give partitions into it, so that my PS will work. Phew~ It got me 6 days to realize this simple cause of everything. Anyway Noel, appreciate your time again for this. It's a rare one, but I'm sure this info will be useful someday somewhere. =)